March 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Courtesy Dark Sky Films Catfight: No, it’s not just you. There’s definitely something in the air. In recent weeks we’ve had a dumb comedy about teachers beating each other silly, a superhero flick with a seriously high body count and a gangster thriller in which Keanu Reeves personally shoots, maims and stabs approximately 8,943 people. We even had a Star Wars in which pretty much everyone died. And now we’ve got Catfight, a comedy-drama about Anne Heche and Sandra Oh kicking the shit out of one another.

Courtesy Abramorama Love & Taxes: Monologuist Josh Kornbluth doesn't seem like a fuck-up, but his stage shows pivot on extended life failures presented as his innate character. Love & Taxes is based on his stage monologue about the consequences of failing to file his tax returns for a seven-year period; his protracted fiduciary penance coincides with meeting and falling in love with a woman named Sara (Sarah Overman).

Courtesy 20th Century Fox Logan: Logan is a punch in the gut in all the right ways. Onscreen, the X-Men series has always found ways to morph and expand, from time-traveling fantasy to social allegory to political thriller. And it’s done so as other comic-book franchises have ossified, with the DC movies (foolishly) doubling down on flamboyant gloominess and Marvel proper (lucratively) committing to jokey spectacle. Constant redefinition may be more risky financially — you never quite know what you’re going to get — but when it works, it can be beautiful. In Logan, we have an example of a superhero story taken to new extremes and a franchise to a spare, sad, apocalyptic finish (or “finish”), with R-rated action scenes that are both rousing and unbearably violent.

Courtesy HBO Cries From Syria: For Evgeny Afineevsky, history is written by rebels, whether they are victorious or not. His unsparing and unforgiving documentary Cries From Syria puts the six-year, still-raging Syrian conflict into historical and personal context, from its idealistic origins during the Arab Spring uprisings to the incomprehensible quagmire of civil war and destabilizing exodus of refugees, part of the largest migration since World War II.

Photo by Francis Wolff/Courtesy Film Rise/Submarine Deluxe/Kasper Collin Produktion AB I Called Him Morgan: It’s fitting that one of the great films about jazz centers on the re-creation of a moment. Kasper Collin’s exquisitely haunted meditation I Called Him Morgan, about the life and untimely death of hard-bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, employs all the techniques you would expect from a documentary study of a musician’s tragedy. Here are performance clips, talking heads, black-and-white stills from the Blue Note archives and judicious excerpts from Morgan’s recordings. But Collin, in collaboration with cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, Arrival), has filled out the usual with a vital evocation of the bandleader’s milieu, often with new 16mm footage that audiences might take for an archival find. Morgan was gunned down in the Alphabet City jazz club Slug’s Saloon in February 1972, during a blizzard so thick that — we’re told — the ambulance took an hour to arrive. Collin shrouds his film in shots of New York whited out with snow, the lit-up lightning of the Chrysler Building one point of orientation. Pulsing and alive beneath it: Morgan’s crisp, insistent trumpet, somehow both preening and coolly nonchalant, out front in cuts from his ’60s quintets and the ’58 to ’61 iteration of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Courtesy The Orchard Donald Cried: The exquisite discomfort of Donald Cried, Kris Avedisian's bracing first feature, arises from the incompatibility of former best friends. Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman) left Warwick, Rhode Island, for college, retooling his working-class past into the model of Wall Street success. Donald Treebeck (Avedisian) stayed put, in mind as well as body. He remains an aimless high school stoner 20 years later, and still yearns for the treasured friend who made the mundane tolerable.

Courtesy XYZ Films/Vertical Entertainment Headshot: After kicking everybody's asses in both The Raid and The Raid 2, Indonesian actor/stuntman/fight choreographer/action god Iko Uwais returns to beat down more — and shatter some skulls, too — in the aptly titled Headshot.

Courtesy Open Road Films Before I Fall: There’s a reason Zoey Deutch is often “the girl” in comedies. Her face expresses multitudes, and the funny guys need a woman with priceless reactions to sell their punch lines. She’s endured dick jokes for Robert De Niro and Zac Efron in Dirty Grandpa, played oblivious straight woman to the crew of Everybody Wants Some!!, smiled shyly for James Franco in Why Him?. But first, in Ry Russo-Young’s light sci-fi teen drama Before I Fall, Deutch plays Samantha Kingston, a girl full of thoughts and wonder who learns the meaning of life by reliving the same fateful 24 hours over and over again.

Courtesy BOND/360 The Settlers: At first, Shimon Dotan's The Settlers proves plodding and familiar as it chronicles the rise of Israel's settler movement — and, more pressingly, what it looks like today: black-and-white newsreel footage, contemporary talking heads, maps with borders drawn and redrawn. We see Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and its aftermath yet again. Of course the film plods; this story is exhausting, drawn-out, decades of fear and violence so familiar that they hardly even shock. Yet we must keep watching, because what Dotan has to say — in arresting new footage — about today's Hilltop Youth, a right-wing Jewish Israeli settler organization that unites and mobilizes young people to occupy territory in the West Bank, is crucial and, in the American context, frighteningly familiar. Both here and there, young white men enact violence on communities of color and then face little or no retribution. Campaign rhetoric about building walls and securing the borders mounts into action.

Courtesy Metrograph Press The Human Surge: Blue illuminates a man’s dark mouth, the glow of his smartphone screen rendering him in something approaching chiaroscuro. This rare moment of baroque portraiture, just right for such a lush and ambitious film, upends both narrative and aesthetic convention. Surreal and wordlessly unsettling, Eduardo Williams’ globe-crossing feature The Human Surge is intimate and pleasurably inscrutable.

Courtesy IFC Films Personal Shopper: In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be." When one goes to see Kristen Stewart — among the most quicksilver of her generation’s performers — in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, a shape-shifting, resolutely of-this-moment ghost story that features her in nearly every frame, one goes not to watch her act but refract.

Courtesy Film Movement Apprentice: The past is a noose around the neck of both death row inmates and those who pull the hangman's lever in Apprentice, Boo Junfeng's mysterious and nuanced prison drama.

Courtesy Janus Films Ugetsu: At once monumental and light as mist, Kenji Mizoguchi's ravishing ghost fantasia Ugetsu (released in 1953 and set in 16th-century Japan) finds its peasant potters fleeing the circumstances of their present (as a warlord's army claims their village) while chasing chimerical visions of a better future. One man seizes the money his wife is counting on and blows it on secondhand samurai armor. Another ditches his own partner to sink into an even less likely opportunity: the alluring necro-life in an out-of-time estate with a pale beauty whose visage is forever smudged by the grave. With rare humanity, Mizoguchi reveals the toll these misadventures take on the souls of both men and their wives, many moments an uncanny synthesis of the realistic and the otherworldly.

Courtesy Focus Features Raw: Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The Notebook — get elevated to folk-hero status: Did he ... does he ... care?! But what happens when female characters truly hunger? What if their desires prove as grotesque as society assumes they are? This is the kind of fear director Julia Ducournau sets loose in her riveting body-horror film Raw, where a young woman comes to understand her own sexuality by way of one of the greatest of taboos: cannibalism.

Courtesy Broad Green Pictures Song to Song: There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it — and you’re usually faced with something simple, almost corny, that seems to undercut the spellbinding invention of his filmmaking. This is, after all, a devout, 70-something guy raised in Oklahoma and Texas who still lives in the Lone Star State in what appears to be quiet modesty. For all the worldly experimentalism of Malick’s style, when his characters actually do “experiment” (and the word regularly comes up from movie to movie) — when they break boundaries, try new things, toss out old rules — it leads to disaster.

Courtesy Streetwise Films Canners: A panning shot in Manfred Kirchheimer’s documentary Canners scans Midtown rooftops and a billboard that reads: “Manhattan: All You Need Is a Million Dollars and a Dream.” Used to be in this town — at least according to the racketeers at the New York State Lottery — that you needed a mere dollar and a dream. Things change, I suppose. Or do they?

Courtesy Kino Lorber Who's Crazy?: Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible. Shot in Belgium in 1966 and boasting a vigorously inventive score from Ornette Coleman's great trio, White's film depicts and exemplifies collective creation as play, whether what's being brought into the world is a new mode of living (as in the film's loose story) or a freewheeling (even slapstick) approach to narrative cinema. Who's Crazy? opens with a busload of youngish mental patients (played by members of New York's experimental Living Theater) en route to an institution; circumstances soon liberate them and, free from the joyous skronking of Coleman's alto, they storm a nearby farmhouse, conveniently empty.

Courtesy Paladin The Ottoman Lieutenant: Let’s say you had to make up a list of historical moments that might serve as grand backdrops for sweeping, old-fashioned, Hollywood-style romantic dramas. How high would you rank the Armenian genocide? How high would you rank any genocide? Watching Hotel Rwanda, you probably never hoped that, amid the carnage, Cupid might find a moment to arrow-prick the heart of Don Cheadle's character. Likewise, as Armenian refugees flee slaughter at the hands of the Ottoman Imperial Army in Joseph Ruben's handsomely mounted The Ottoman Lieutenant, you might wonder why the camera doesn't follow them and bear witness to their fate rather than continue its dogged documentation of the American heroine’s struggles with what my mother calls "kissing problems."

Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment Mean Dreams: Even if it were not for the fact that Mean Dreams has become Bill Paxton's penultimate picture, Nathan Morlando's thriller would be worth recommending entirely on its own merits. Start with cinematographer Steve Cosens (The Tracey Fragments), who uses sharp focus and the occasional faded Polaroid–style filter to lovingly caress every bump and contour of the jagged tree stumps and run-down farmhouses that litter the beautifully middle-of-nowhere setting. The effect makes this world alien yet universal: The two teens who will become our leads fall in love because they are literally the only boy and girl in the world as far as their eyes can see. Jonas (Josh Wiggins) is an only child who works on his parents' farm; Casey (Sophie Nélisse) has just moved to town with single dad Wayne (Paxton), who's a cop and has recently been reassigned.

Photo by Anne Marie Fox/Courtesy Focus Features The Zookeeper's Wife: Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider; McFarland, USA) has the rare ability to elevate what could be emotionally manipulative schlock to earnest art. Now she's brought her skills to a period piece about the Warsaw Zoo's husband-wife caretakers, who trafficked hundreds of Jews out of the Nazi-controlled ghettos. True to form, Caro seems unbound by her audience's expectations of a WWII picture; she delivers a singular, thrilling portrait, filled with surprises and moving performances.

Courtesy Film Movement After the Storm: Director Hirokazu Kore-eda's stories, such as they are, unfold in unlikely ways. He doesn't play so much with structure but with focus: He'll allow a scene to go on and on before slipping in a crucial bit of narrative information that sends the story off in a new direction. That could result in chaos, but Kore-eda's absorption in these lives, his ability to imbue the slightest exchange or glance with warmth and humor, transfixes us. After the Storm might be his most devastating work yet.

Courtesy Park Circus Manhattan: In the spring of 1979, with a new film to promote, Woody Allen agreed to a lengthy profile in The New York Times Magazine. In it, Allen talks a little about Manhattan, the film in question, which follows an alter ego named Isaac through a period of professional and romantic frustration, and a lot about his determination "to advance in the direction of films that are more human and less cartoon." In this he appears to conspire with the profile's larger thesis: that the 43-year-old filmmaker known for his broad comic persona and gag-driven films like Sleeper and Bananas was finally ready to hang up his sperm costume, unplug the Orgasmatron and grow up. The headline hails "The Maturing of Woody Allen."

Courtesy Factory 25 All This Panic: Teendom's tumultuousness may lend itself to big-screen clichés, but All This Panic — a documentary that follows a group of NYC high-school girlfriends over the course of three years — digs deeper to reveal the rawness, confusion, fear, aimlessness and euphoria of that most turbulent of times. Eschewing narration or even title cards to indicate when and where the action is taking place, director Jenny Gage and cinematographer Tom Betterton's sterling vérité work segues freely among its young women, who find themselves coping with (and expressing unfiltered opinions about) volatile family lives, uncertainty over their collegiate futures, sexual anxieties and pressures, and drug and alcohol use.

Courtesy Shudder Prevenge: There's a horror movie inside Alice Lowe's darkly comic slasher film Prevenge, but not the one you'd expect. Sure, the killer, Ruth (played by Lowe, who also wrote and directed it during her real-life pregnancy), is quick with her knife, and kills without warning. The film never dwells on her victims' dread, though — instead, we're so deep in Ruth's head that we can hear her fetus, urging her on in a sinister-sweet voice. Ruth stalks and kills her victims, recording her progress in a Baby's First Steps book. The film is suffused with Lowe's mordant wit — a drunken lothario vomits into his costume wig, then goes in for another kiss; there's a masterfully timed lactation joke.

March 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for the best films of March 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in April.

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for the best films of March 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in April.